When I was getting into comics, lo these many years ago, the rage was all for "cinematic" storytelling. What this meant was, basically, wasting whole pages on actions that should have been handled in one panel. Somebody walking down a street, for instance. Or running down a subway platform. The panels became "frames" of film, with the action progressing only slightly from one to the next.*

(And, yes, I know a few years back we got a whole page of some character falling out of bed! "Cinematic" is sometimes called "decompressed" these days, it seems!)

These wasteful double page spreads seem almost like the flipside of "cinematic" storytelling. Like a freeze-frame that goes on too long.

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* The cosmic balance for this was to be found in those writers who would ask for multiple actions from a single character IN ONE PANEL! That was how those multiple-figure shots I used to do of Iron Fist evolved.

(At a convention, when I was working on FF, a fan asked me why I never seemed to do that kind of shot anymore. "I'm not working with Claremont any more!" quipped I!)

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Hey, I'm a big fan of SOME characters "running on air"!

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There IS a limitation in the terminology. Anything that crosses the fold is considered a "spread", but not all are fully "double page spreads" in the sense being used here.

Now that you all know about THE HIGH WAYS, let me share an example of me trying to use pages 2 and 3 to maximum advantage. Fear not, no spoilers!

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Thanks! This is perhaps something worth touching upon a bit more.

An important storytelling rule that was pounded into my pointy little head early on (for which, thanks to Marty Pasko) is NEVER CROSS THE 180° LINE! (What's the 180° line? Think of it as the flat surface of the page -- a surface that bisects every image -- even in the real world! -- at 90° to the observer's line of sight.)

Like all such "absolute" rules, there are occasions when flipping the viewpoint from one panel to the next CAN work, and even be effective -- but it takes a particular level of skill to accomplish it! Skill I, for one, do not pretend to have!

A very BAD example of crossing the 180° line occurred in a book I read way, way back, not long after I got into the Biz. Two characters are walking, facing right, talking. In the next panel, one of the characters, a woman, is facing left in a closeup on just her. The effect was as if her twin sister had burst into the room and was interrupting the conversation.

So, yeah, in general it's best to keep the "flow" going in the same direction, panel to panel (unless, of course, the characters ACTUALLY change direction!)*

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* And there we can run into a whole 'nother problem -- when artists have characters change direction but ALSO have their "camera" cross the 180° line, so that it's hard to tell the characters HAVE changed direction!

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Generally, I don't like doing Pin-Ups. It's one of the reasons I'm not crazy about "symbolic" covers (as opposed to representational), and one of the reasons it took Jim Warden so long to convince me to start doing commissions.

Of course, in the latter case, once I DID start, I quickly (like, with the very first one) discovered a commission is really a whole 'nother kind of beast, since it has to tell a STORY in a single image.